Good day to you! After much deliberation (no deliberation at all) and consideration (a very low amount of considering occurred), I decided to go ahead and do Chloe’s newest challenge after all. I got through a week of Caroline’s Epic Heat, and, while very enjoyable, turned out to still be a bit too much for me at present.
Not to say that Epic Heat wasn’t great – it was. It was maybe too good. Or, at least, too intense in difficulty for me right now in between my intense wushu classes. I ended up so exhausted last week that I wasn’t able to do any workouts beyond my 3 wushu classes. In fact, even in my wushu classes I was very low on energy compared to before. I think I probably went too hard before and my body just decided it wasn’t having it any longer.
I want to push myself, but not to the extent that I need almost an entire week off from regular workouts to recover, with my energy also being impacted for wushu classes. Therefore, we’re going to go ahead with the Get Abs Challenge and see how we do.
I’m doing this challenge with a friend again because working out as a team genuinely makes such a massive difference to my motivation. I might actually fail the team challenge because I won’t be working out on my wushu days, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
For this challenge, I’m going to be switching up the format of my posts a little. Rather than doing Weeks 1-3, I’ll be adding a new post for 3 days at a time. There are 18 days in total, so expect 6 posts in total from me. Hopefully it won’t take me 6 weeks to complete!
To be clear, I’m absolutely not expecting abs from this challenge (although, I kind of already have some ab definition so it’s not entirely outside the realms of possibility), but I do genuinely enjoy working my core. My core is incredibly weak, and core strength is vital for stability for a multitude of movements and lifting, so I’m hoping to improve my core strength since the challenge is going to be quite ab-heavy.
Days 1–3
7/18 – Day 1: Completed 12:44.
Videos completed: 5min Warm Up, Full Body HIIT, Intense Abs Workout, 5min Cooldown Stretch.
I quite enjoyed today’s workout! It felt doable and flew by as I was listening to YouTube videos at the same time. I made a greater effort to engage my core during the abs video and really felt it in my core. My abs are still super weak and I could barely do more than 4 hip dips in a regular plank before taking a break.
I know I compensate a lot with other muscles when I do the ab videos, so I’ve decided for this challenge that I want to focus on quality over quantity – I can collapse all I want and not be ashamed at only being able to do a few reps as long as they were good reps. That’s how to improve, after all.
For the pushups, because of what my Sifu told me, I decided to do the halfway pushups so I could practice those. I thought they were a lot easier, turns out I didn’t go quite deep enough, whoops! I turned around for the side plank dips this time and oh. my. Can I just say, muscles? :o
Finally, I had a bit of a chuckle when I realised one of the songs Chloe used this time around was also one of Caroline’s go-to background tracks. I liked that a lot :p
7/20 – Day 2: Completed 12:33.
Videos completed: Booty & Legs, Perky Butt.
I had fairly limited time to get my workout done today so I ended up skipping a full warm up / cooldown and just doing a few pre-workout stretches, while taking the first few exercises a little easier. I liked the new video, the floor work exercises really helped me to activate my glutes before doing the standing exercises.
I focused hard on making my glutes do all the work on the floor and boy did my butt hurt, but I don’t think I was able to have that same focus for the standing exercises. I could feel my thighs, hamstrings and even lower back compensating sometimes.
I ended up with mild pain in my lower back that’s always a sign that something is off with my form, so I had to be a little more careful after that. I actually don’t recall doing the Perky Butt video at all during the Summer Shred Challenge but I’m sure I did do it. Either way, like the Booty & Legs video, I didn’t really feel the standing exercises in my booty, but I did for the floor exercises.
I didn’t watch any videos while doing the workout today so I was able to focus better But because of that, for some of the floor exercises, I felt like I was pushing close to failure and really needed a longer rest time than what Chloe gave. I think that could have impacted my performance for the standing exercises too.
Overall, not bad! I’d probably rate the difficulty about 7/10, enjoyability about 6.5/10.
7/22 – Day 3: Completed 12:13.
Videos completed: 5min Warm Up, Core & Arms, Intense Abs Workout, Arms & Core, 5min Daily Stretch.
Um, excuse me, Chloe, what are those tricep planks and are you trying to break my arms? I mean, starting with contralaterals were already bad enough! However, I am pleased that I focused on quality over quantity today. I tried to keep my core engaged for the exercises and stopped when I felt like my core wasn’t engaged.
That meant I was only able to do 3-4 reps for some movements, but getting fewer good reps in was the goal today. It also meant I took longer rests between the sets since my body needed it. I did “proper” pushups today as well, and my dolphin plank form was on point today!
My body was very confused by the tricep planks during the video, but I tried them again after the video was complete and I was finally able to understand them and (sort of) do a couple. I mean, my body was not happy with me, but there was a valiant attempt, okay?
Overall I liked the workout but it was probably the least wrist-friendly workout I’ve done in a while. I had to amend some of the exercises so that I wouldn’t put as much strain on my wrist. I’m not looking forward to this combo again for the sake of my poor wrists.
Difficulty probably 7.5/10, enjoyability probably about 7/10 because it was pretty fun.
Muchos love,